Isn’t it confused to ask for the end of a war while starting a class war?

“Get money out of politics.”

Isn’t the demand to “get money out of politics” also confused? Isn’t this entire demonstration an effort to politicize the economy?

The current general assembly doesn’t really want to separate money and politics, it seeks to further conjoin them. The folks that have assembled want the market to work for the People. However, lets not make this into a lefty attempt to create an empowered, just, and benevolent state. This is a fantasy, but so is the rightist attempt to limit the state for the sake of a “free market.” There is no “benevolent power” and there is no “free market,” aren’t these contradictions in terms?

The fundamental moral project of modernity is autonomy. Let us return to that notion, this is a protest agianst illegitimate authority as such. Therefore, this is a protest against both state andcapital and it exceeds the bounds of left-wing and right-wing aligments.

The best allegory that has been brought to my attention comes from Star Wars. The powers of capital (“corporations”) are The Emperor, and the state is Darth Vader. Our only hope is for Darth Vader to throw The Emperor to his death, but in order for that to happen, Darth Vader must also be defeated.

At this very moment #ows is nothing less and nothing more than a democratic rebirth. Ignore congress, ignore the senate, ignore Obama, and let the people speak, you can listen to them at your local general assembly.

Of course, we know it isn’t that simple and that’s way the #ows movement is commited to a long term praxis of direct democracy.

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Good point about the contradiction in terms, ‘benevolent power’ and ‘free market.’ And the allegory is brilliant! I love it. The rebirth can happen only if it ignores the distractions of the organizations and power-relations which, as of the first moment of the protest, have lost their authority. And the demonstrators seem to be doing this rather well. They seem to be staying focused on what’s relevant. The cool thing is that I think things are so bad, and so complicated, that people simply don’t have an easy ‘Master’ figure to look to anymore (they can’t find one, and if they could, they couldn’t trust it), which makes it a lot easier to leave the past behind and not fall for the trap of resurrecting Darth Vader or The Emperor (though of course this is only by degrees… I don’t think the State is going anywhere for the time being).

I’m also mistrustful of the motivations for making statements about getting money out of politics. It seems like this could be based on a naive understanding of what needs to be done, of the hard road ahead. And it seems sometimes like we’re up against such colossal adversaries that anything short of war can’t possibly be enough, or that, at the very least, the rhetoric needs to get more aggressive, lest we neglect to pull out all the stops we can, while we can, while we have the stage; (then again, you have people like both Zizek and Naomi Klein suggesting that the ultimate strength of the protests so far is that they’re not feeding the media’s craving for ‘random’ violence, that they’re disciplined enough to stay the course and resist violence).

The two quotes you use at the beginning both have to do with antagonism toward money in general. However, I think that the point about getting money out of politics is that there should be space for a politics that isn’t unduly *influenced* / steered by monetary power, not a politics that avoids problems in the monetary system altogether. I think people understand that we’re trying to re-politicize the economy, and that there’s a battle to be fought. Sure, there are overtones of the misguided self-righteous call for a pure, just state. But I think, on the whole, that the protestors are trying to make two clear moves: (1) bring down the establishment and then (2) set up something new in its place. Both of those are energy-intensive, antagonistic actions. If the protestors were naively advocating a totally non-corrupt social system, then I think we’d see them expressing the desire to take a third, milder course, one in between the two phases of revolutionary action (destruction and rebirth). I guess you could call that third kind – or ‘third way’ – a push for reform. Of course I worry that the revolutionary energy may eventually be diluted and molded into a reform package unworthy of the movement it speaks to. The difference between radical democracy and reform is, precisely, the difference between theorizing the political as a hegemonic struggle and theorizing it as a linear, progressive historical development.

I think it’s key to our understanding of #ows that, as I mention in my first comment, since many people simply can’t believe in the powers that be (and historical progress/reform) anymore, #ows will have to come up with another system (a new Master Signifier) to believe in; since the old Master is no longer reliable, it’s up to them to convince themselves of the validity of their new creation. I suppose that would theoretically be an example of traversing the fantasy.

This seems immensely complicated, since we’re talking about bridging the gap between the individual-clinical traversing of fantasy and the group-societal traversing of fantasy. It gets caught up in problems of reference — whose fantasy? whose ISR coordinates? and how do we know? is it all happening somewhere ‘between’ individuals, or in themselves? if it’s a social movement, then would the traversal necessarily entail a social, rather than individual, change? what does that mean? would we need to see a change manifest in other individuals or other institutions, unlike in the clinical scenario, in which the traversing of fantasy is completely independent of what’s happening in the world around the analysand? if a massive traversal of fantasy doesn’t require that, then how would we know it has occurred? and does that matter?

These questions tie into problems of aesthetics and interpretation. Who is to say that a traversal has taken place? Ideological critique is good for that. But I think it has to go beyond Zizek. Ranciere is more and more interesting in that regard. Once I actually get through a substantial chunk of his ‘Politics and Aesthetics,’ I’ll have to write something.

It looks like I am caught in the impossibility/necessity of communism. Only when the many act as one will there be a mass liberation. This 100% consensus is impossible, yet it fuels all egalitarian efforts.

However, I have been trying to articulate the unity in difference at #ows, which I think points to a society that could take dissent as more deeply felt than consent. “The revolution” will not install another Big Other to unite the People, we will not merely traverse the fantasy from one Master to another, instead it will simultaneosuly splinter and connect us, allowing for greater disagreement and autonomous platforms of action while putting in place the shared network that makes individual difference possible.